Intel introduced a 128GB Thunderbolt thumb drive at the Computex trade show in Taipei today, reports PCWorld. The drive, which Intel is calling the "world's fastest thumb drive," is similar in size to a standard flash drive and does not require an expensive Thunderbolt cable to connect to a Mac or PC.

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This is one of the first thumb drives demonstrated using Thunderbolt connectivity, which is the fastest technology available to transfer data between computers and peripherals, said Oren Huber, a Thunderbolt engineer at Intel Israel.

Thunderbolt can transfer data at a speed of 10Gbps, which is faster than USB 3.0 and USB 2.0. Right now USB 3.0 is about half the speed of Thunderbolt.

Intel's thumb drive uses a SanDisk SSD for storage, though that may change if the product goes into production. At this point, the thumb drive is just a prototype, with no potential price point provided.

Given the high prices and limited adoption of Thunderbolt, it may be quite some time before a consumer version of the Thunderbolt thumb drive is available for purchase. Earlier this week, Intel officially announced*the next iteration of Thunderbolt, Thunderbolt 2, which will begin production in late 2013.

It's hard to imagine the pricing for this being announced by anyone but Doctor Evil.

Will it necessarily be that fast? I was under the impression that the bottleneck in most typical thumb drives was slow (cheap) memory that wasn't even as fast as the interface. Are there USB3 thumb drives that actually transfer half a gig per second?

It's not completely new, just the same thing but double the speed. I don't know what would be messed up about the first version, it just hasn't been widely adopted and thus is still expensive, but I haven't heard any complaints about the technology itself.

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Originally Posted by subsonix

Not necessarily, but in this case it uses a Sandisk SSD. It would be pretty dumb to just use regular thumb drive internals.

Thanks, I missed the SSD part. It would be pretty crazy to have SSD thumb drives running at full speed. I wonder if the "thumb" form factor could potentially keep down the price compared to putting an SSD into an external TB hard drive case. I would hope so.

It's hard to imagine the pricing for this being announced by anyone but Doctor Evil.

Will it necessarily be that fast? I was under the impression that the bottleneck in most typical thumb drives was slow (cheap) memory that wasn't even as fast as the interface. Are there USB3 thumb drives that actually transfer half a gig per second?

The "half gig per second" you quote is theoretical speed. It's near impossible to reach that in real life especially for (relatively) small files that most people use thumb drives for. Thunderbolt can easily saturate the connection. Also, flash memory (the cheap memory you mentioned) and SSD, in very technical terms, two different storage mediums. I don't want to get technical here but there's a reason why SSDs right now are like 500MB/s (BYTE not BIT) read/write and USB flash drives are much much slower.

That being said, I'm going to venture out and guess that this won't be cheap. Certainly not USB drive cheap. USB 3 is roughly $1/GB, give or take. This is so much faster with better memory chips. Plus, Thunderbolt ports aren't as ubiquitous as USB 2/3. Not many PCs have them, while pretty much any 1-2 year old Mac does.

USB 3.0 isn't exactly slow and I can get a 64GB drive shipped from Amazon for £27.

The bottle neck isn't USB with a regular thumb drive. They are really slow, regardless of interface. If someone puts a Sandisk SSD inside a USB thumbdrive, it will not cost 27 pounds, you may have to add a zero.

This is not your typical transfer thumb drive for simple file transferring, though.
It's actually a removable ssd-speed disk expansion. You can actually use it as a main boot / system drive for any mac you own.